Step-Ball-Change: A Novel Page 5

  Kay nodded and picked up the dog around the middle. She carried it with her arms stretched out in front of her as if it was something she was in a hurry to get into the wash. Stamp seemed to have no sense that he was off the ground. His legs still pulsed as if he were hopping. He barked at the men in the truck until Woodrow came into view, and then he barked at Woodrow again briefly until Kay took him down the hall, at which point he started barking at Mr. Kelly, who was just coming in with the vacuum. Mr. Kelly, a short, heavyset man in his fifties, pressed himself hard against the wall to give Kay and the dog as wide a passage as was possible. Kay opened the door to her old bedroom, where Taffy would be staying, pitched in the dog, and slammed the door.

  “You don’t have to throw him,” Taffy said to Kay. “It works perfectly well to just set him down on the floor.”

  Kay was a lawyer. She was capable of controlling herself when she had to, but I could see the muscles working in her jaw, a gene she had picked up from her father. “Mr. Kelly, Mr. Woodrow, this is my aunt, Taffy Bishop from Atlanta.”

  “I thought that dog was from Atlanta,” Woodrow said.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Mr. Kelly said in a weak voice.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Woodrow said.

  Taffy nodded at them and then turned to me. “Are you adding on to the house?”

  “Well, that’s how it started.”

  “I’m going to go on down to the basement and have a look at those pipes,” Mr. Kelly said, taking a red bandanna out of his pocket and wiping down his large expanse of forehead. “That dog doesn’t go down to the basement, does he?”

  “Never,” Taffy said.

  Mr. Kelly left the vacuum in the middle of the hall and made a quick exit. He wanted to get away from us, all of us. He would clearly be more comfortable underground.

  “I suppose I should be getting back to work myself,” Woodrow said. He turned to Kay. He was hoping to calm her down. “We’ll talk more about the dresses later. I just want you to be sure and pick something before I finish the job.”

  “Mother’s right. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Woodrow nodded and left the kitchen. He was so tall and thin, so graceful that I always thought he could have been a dancer. He had once confided in me that even in his early sixties he was still plagued by people asking him if he had ever thought of playing professional basketball.

  “The workmen are helping you pick out dresses?” Taffy said.

  “It’s not the workmen,” Kay said, her voice breaking slightly. “It’s Woodrow. Woodrow has very good taste.”

  “He has four daughters,” I said. “He knows a lot about clothes.”

  “There’s something here I’m not getting,” Taffy said.

  “Do you have more luggage?” Kay said. “I could go out and get it for you.”

  “Isn’t George here? There’s too much for you to carry in.”

  How much luggage could there be? “George isn’t going to be home for a while. He’s over at the school.”

  “He’s at law school,” Taffy said, not asking a question but telling me where he was.

  “Actually, right this minute he’s at the dance school.”

  “I’m getting the luggage,” Kay said, clearly dying to leave the room. She was probably wishing that Markus Jones had never shown up this morning. She was wishing that she was still sitting in her office, tapping a pencil against her desk, waiting.

  “Kay, be a dear and let Stamp out of the bedroom.”

  Kay detoured down the hall and we heard her kick open the door before disappearing outside. Stamp came back to his spot like a moth to a floodlight, parking it at the back door and resuming his barking as if he had never been gone at all.

  “Is Kay having problems at work? I don’t remember her having a temper like that.”

  “No, I think work is fine.”

  “Stamp,” Taffy said, raising her voice over the drumbeat of dog bark. “Really, that’s enough.”

  But what was enough for us was not enough for Stamp, who kept right on barking.

  “Isn’t George still in law school?”

  “Of course he’s still in law school. He just came down to cover my class for me so I could be here when you got in. To tell you the truth, I thought you’d be coming later.”

  “Minnie, I wish you wouldn’t let George teach.”

  “Teach ballet?”

  “It’s not exactly encouraging him to go in the right direction.”

  “Which direction?”

  Taffy shrugged. “You know I think the world of George. All I’m saying is that it’s pretty clear that he could go either way, and ballet classes never steered any young man toward a normal family life.”

  “Are we talking about George being gay?” I had forgotten that Taffy had a penchant for speaking in code when the subject made her uncomfortable. “George isn’t gay. Besides, this class is for four- and five-year-olds. It isn’t a particularly corrupting level of dance.”

  “I still think it would be safer if he stuck to law school.”

  I wanted to explain that he was sticking to law school, but when I heard a thumping in the front hallway I went to help Kay wrestle in Taffy’s suitcase. It was red leather, the same as the little bag I had carried in, but this one called to mind the kind of steamer trunks one took to Europe in the twenties if one was going to Europe for a year or two. Kay was sweating and her face was flushed, but she still looked calmer than she had when she left.

  “How did you get that thing in the car?” I asked Taffy.

  Kay slumped over the top of the suitcase and took a few deep breaths. “There’s another one.”

  “I wasn’t sure about what I’d need,” Taffy said. “I was up in the middle of the night and I just kept putting more things in.”

  I thought about the way women in movies packed when they were leaving their husbands. They opened up a dresser drawer, scooped up the silky contents without looking at it, dropped it all into a suitcase, and then snapped the suitcase shut and made for the door, the feather-light bag in one hand. Taffy seemed to be operating on that principle, but she had clearly hit every drawer, every closet, in the house.

  “Is Uncle Neddy coming up?” Kay said.

  Taffy and I both looked at her. I remembered then that I hadn’t told Kay about Neddy’s junior executive. Last night wasn’t the time, what with Trey and the ring, and there hadn’t been a chance yet this morning.

  “Neddy—” I said.

  “Neddy left me,” Taffy said. When she said it she turned away from us. I thought she was going to walk outside and collect herself for a minute, but instead she sat down on the floor in the front hallway as if all her packing and driving had suddenly caught up with her and she could not go another step. I was worried that there was drywall dust on the floor. As soon as she sat down, Stamp abandoned his post of growling and came trotting into the hall and climbed into my sister’s lap. He made two full rotations on her soft camel pants, curled into a tight ball, and fell asleep. Then Taffy started to cry, and at the sight of those tears Kay began to cry, because Kay never could stand to see anyone else cry. She sat down on the floor and put her arms around Taffy. Stamp, perhaps exhausted by his long spate of ill temper, did not lift his head. They cried together on the floor, my daughter and my sister, until I was reduced to tears myself and slid down the wall to join them.

  “I didn’t know,” Kay said.

  I was glad that she didn’t know because I think all of this crying made Taffy feel she had come to the right place after all. Taffy took Kay’s hand and squeezed it, receiving the solid bite of the five-and-a-half-carat diamond for her troubles.

  “My God,” Taffy said. “You’re engaged.” She turned to me because I was the one who should have told her. “Why didn’t you tell me Kay was engaged?”

  “It only happened last night.”

  “Kay,” Taffy said, her mascara starting to run, “I’m so happy for you.”

  That was as far
as we had gotten, as much information as had been disclosed. We were three women sitting on the floor crying, with a suitcase the size of a Buick lodged halfway in and halfway out of the open front door. We were contemplating the institution of marriage, how it might fail or succeed, when Tom walked in and found us there. Stamp, startled from his sound sleep, woke up and bit him.

  chapter five

  TOM SHOOK HIS LEG. HE GAVE THREE GOOD KICKS before the dog disengaged. As soon as Stamp no longer had his mouth full of my husband’s calf, he started barking and growling as if he was thinking about going in for more. Who’s to say he wouldn’t have except for Kay getting her hand under the collar and holding him back.

  “Look at that,” Taffy said. “You’re the first person that dog’s ever bitten.”

  I scrambled up from the floor. “Are you okay?”

  “Dad, are you all right?”

  “Except for Neddy. He did bite Neddy.”

  “Jesus!” Tom leaned against the suitcase, holding one foot off the floor.

  “Did he break the skin?” Kay said.

  “I think he might have broken the bone.” Tom winced and cupped one hand under his knee. “Did you train the dog to do that?”

  “He never does that,” Taffy said, clinging to the last thin strands of denial. Stamp was still racing toward Tom while Kay held him in place by his collar, his nails clacking ceaselessly to nowhere on the wood floor.

  “You just said he bites Uncle Neddy,” Kay said.

  “That’s entirely different.”

  “Has he had all of his shots?” I asked. I didn’t want to think of Tom with rabies.

  Taffy took the question as a complete affront to her competence as a pet owner. “What a thing to ask. Of course he’s had his shots.”

  Stamp was barking like a maniac again. Kay tried holding his snout closed, but it wasn’t possible.

  “Kay, get your hand away from its mouth,” Tom said.

  “He’s not going to bite Kay,” Taffy said. “Stamp, stop it now.”

  Stamp ignored her. He kept on barking, scrambling forward to nowhere.

  I knew it was up to me to look at Tom’s leg. I was the wife. Somewhere in the marriage vows was an unspoken clause that you’re the one who has to assess all bloody wounds. I wished that I could say that Tom was one to exaggerate injury, but he was a stoic. I’d seen him go to trial with a fever of a hundred and three and never issue a complaint.

  I knelt back down. I held his shoe in my hand. There was a long, jagged tear in his suit pants (how he loved that suit, and it should have gone to Goodwill two years ago), and the edges were dark and wet. This wasn’t going to be good. I found the indefatigable barking more wearing than the vacuum cleaner.

  “How does it look?” Tom said.

  “I’m not there yet.”

  “Taffy, if it isn’t asking too much, maybe you could put Cujo here in the back? I don’t want him getting excited by the sight of blood.” Tom kept his eyes closed. He didn’t raise his voice.

  Taffy got off of the floor and picked Stamp up. Kay kept a hand on his collar until the last possible second. As soon as Taffy had him in her arms, he went limp, relaxed by his enormous output of energy. “You’ve got to remember he’s a dog,” Taffy said.

  “I remember he’s a dog,” Tom said.

  I was still holding his foot. I pulled back one edge of the torn pants like a curtain. There were two deep punctures, each jagged at the bottom where the dog had tried to hang on while Tom shook him off, each pumping a steady supply of blood into my husband’s sock.

  “This has been a traumatic time for him. Dogs have an excellent sense of what’s going on around them. When you came in and startled him—”

  “Taffy,” Tom whispered.

  “What?”

  “Go put the dog in the back.”

  She sighed. Even if she had wanted to defend Stamp, she never would have won. Tom was a professional, after all.

  “So, is this a trip to the hospital?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, I’d think so. You haven’t had a tetanus shot since you ran that piece of the gutter through your hand ten years ago.”

  “Do you think the dog had any rusty metal in its mouth?”

  “Neddy never goes to the hospital,” Kay said, making her voice sound uncannily like Taffy’s.

  “Ned pours a single-malt scotch into the holes and calls it a day,” Tom said. “But I’m no Ned.”

  Kay wanted to come along and said she would call Trey and break their lunch date, but I talked her out of it. It was clear that Tom was going to live, and I didn’t think there was any reason for all three of us to watch him get a tetanus shot. Besides, I wanted a minute alone with Tom. What with the impending marriage-divorce doubleheader, I had a feeling that time alone was going to be harder to get.

  “Come back to work after lunch,” Tom said to Kay.

  “When you get to the hospital, tell them you don’t know whether or not Stamp has rabies,” Kay said, helping me walk Tom out to the car, one of us on each side. “Then the Department of Animal Control will come and take him away. And you know if they take Stamp away, they’ll have to take Aunt Taffy, too.” She kissed her father and wished us luck, then she got into her own car and drove away.

  “See if you can’t get your leg up on the dashboard,” I said to Tom. “I think you’re supposed to elevate it.”

  The car was a little too small or Tom was a little too big. It took a good deal of effort for him to hoist his leg up onto the dash.

  “So,” Tom said. “Let’s go back to my entrance, just before the part with the dog: I come into the house and I find the three of you on the floor crying.”

  “Oh, Taffy told Kay about the divorce and Kay told Taffy she was getting married. It was a little emotional.”

  “I thought you might have been crying over the size of her suitcase.”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “Tell me Stamp sleeps in the suitcase.”

  “I think Stamp sleeps in our bed and we sleep in the suitcase, but I’m just guessing. Why did you come home, anyway?”

  “I called over to the school to talk to you, and George told me you’d gone home to meet Taffy. I’m not in court until after lunch, so I thought I’d come by, lend a little moral support.”

  “Lend a chunk of your leg.” I turned down the street that would take us to the hospital.

  “Anything for the cause.” Tom readjusted his knee into a better position. “It’s not like I was bitten by a rottweiler. Do you really think we need to go?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  Tom sighed. “To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for Taffy. You get to be this age, you think everything is pretty much settled. It would be a hell of a thing to have to rethink your whole life at this point.”

  I reached over the gearshift and took my husband’s hand. I agreed with him. It would be a hell of a thing.

  WE WERE TOLD that there would be no need for stitches, that puncture wounds needed to heal from the bottom rather than the top, a thought that made me feel squeamish. After the shot and a thoroughly unpleasant application of Betadine and antibiotic ointment, a bandage was applied and I drove Tom back to the courthouse. I thought we should at least go by the house so that he could get another suit, but he couldn’t be late for court. “I’ll put some tape on the inside,” he said. “No one is going to be looking at my ankles.”

  “I look at your ankles all the time.”

  “Thank God Stamp didn’t bite you. At least I can still work with a couple of holes in my leg.”

  “You’d sacrifice your leg for mine?”

  “Any day.”

  It was the sign of a good man. “Call me when you’re ready to come home.”

  Tom shook his head. “Kay can give me a ride.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. I tried to make it count. A person had to be diligent about kissing. Kissing was the affirmation of the union, the secret handshake that identified its members. And even knowing
how important it was, it was easy to let it slide altogether, and suddenly one day you wake up and realize that it has been weeks since you’ve kissed your husband while you’ve had any clothes on. Worse still were the kisses that became mere gestures of kissing, those hard little pecks like the kind you got from a great-aunt when you were five, kisses that weren’t kisses at all but said instead, I used to kiss you and this is the symbol that now stands in its place. It was the difference between eating a great meal and looking at a picture of food in a magazine: One made you feel full and the other only reminded you that you were hungry.

  “I should get bitten by dogs more often,” Tom said softly.

  I kissed him again.

  “What if the district attorney sees me making out in front of the courthouse?”

  “He’ll know he doesn’t have a chance,” I said.

  Tom got out of the car, waved to me, and limped up the stone stairs, the bottom of his pants leg fluttering open in the afternoon breeze.

  I felt a little guilty, using what had happened to Taffy to remind me that I was lucky for what I had, but I did it anyway.

  THE SECOND I opened the door of the house, Stamp fired off like a handgun. It was a barking all out of proportion to the size of the dog. He sounded like a pack of police-trained Dobermans charging up the hall. You had to wonder where such a little dog was storing so much hostility. Taffy had wall-to-wall carpet in her house, and so when Stamp barreled up the oak floor to my front door doing ninety-five, he couldn’t hold on to the turn and so skidded into the door of the coat closet, stunning himself for a second. Once he got on his feet again and saw that it was only me, he came over, sniffed my ankles benignly, and headed back to the kitchen.

  “Is Tom all right?” Taffy said.

  “I think he’s fine.” I dropped my purse on the kitchen table. I was still dressed from dance class this morning, which would save me having to change, since I had an afternoon class to teach in an hour.

  “I think he overreacted a little. Neddy never goes to the hospital.”

  “He hadn’t had a tetanus shot in years.”

  “Oh,” Taffy said. “Then he needed to go anyway.”